Chapter 1

David Chambers trudged along behind professor Abbott, cursing his luck. As an anthropology grad student, he expected to have to play serving boy to whatever professor he got posted to, but why did he have to get posted to professor Abbott?

Not that professor Abbott was a bad anthropologist, anything but. He was, although somewhat unorthodox, one of the best in the field. Unfortunately, in the field, he was as hard on his grad students as he was good at teaching in the class. He literally used his appointees as slave labor, and because grades and further field work relied upon his recommendation, whoever got assigned to him had to take it. And David was this trip's unfortunate victim.

It might be different if David saw a point to what he was doing, but what the professor was doing was ludicrous. The professor had latched onto the old myth of Aphrodite suddenly appearing on a shell from the sea and determined that somewhere in the Atlantic was the hidden birthplace of the goddess of love. Now he was slogging through the jungle of a tropical island in search of... something that even the professor couldn't say definitively what it was.